Corporate Life I

Unlike Dogs, American Workers Are Not That Stupid, And They Do Not Return Unkindness With Blind Love.

Rekindling Loyalty?

October 06, 1996|By Charles M. Madigan, Tribune senior writer.

About 100 years ago, the Sears catalog offered what might be viewed by modern corporate America as the perfect implement, a device that could be attached to almost any mechanical appliance in the house and thereby put to good use the least productive member of the family.

The dog.

The product was a treadmill. Put a pork chop bone in the front and put Shep or Arlo in the cratelike enclosure that surrounded the treadmill track and he would immediately start running for that bone, providing all the energy a family needed to power whatever was attached to the treadmill.

The ad copy suggested a Sears washing machine would be a good dog-operated implement. It also could run the butter churn or grinding wheel or any number of other whizzing, whirling 19th Century things.

It was a beautiful invention because you could work your dog all day, as hard as you worked yourself, and then rest assured that no matter how much abuse you handed out, this notoriously affectionate animal would come loping into the kitchen, nuzzle a knee and look adoringly upon whomever happened to be there.

That's loyalty for you.

The lesson for the modern manager is that if a company wants loyalty, then, it should buy dogs and treadmills. It is unlikely that corporate America will get it these days from very many of its employees. Unlike dogs, they are not that stupid and they do not return unkindnesses with blind love.

Managers are starting to search for ways to rekindle loyalties in the wake of downsizing. That period served to break, burn and spread to the winds the ashes of the era of loyalty following World War II.

Ford Motor Co., noted the Wall Street Journal, has negotiated a contract in which it promises that 95 percent of its employees will have their jobs over the three-year term of the agreement. Other companies are climbing on board, too, along with management consultants, who are beginning to shift to a "value your workers" approach after a decade of decimation.

Why is this happening?

First, it is likely that the price tag for the re-engineering rage has finally arrived. James Champy and Michael Hammer, the grandfathers of the re-engineering fad, only a few years ago were advocating changes so radical that companies were advised to abandon everything and rebuild their operations from the foundation up.

After all, the whole movement was constructed on the foundation of a Harvard Business Review article in 1990 that ran under the headline: "Re-engineering: Don't Automate, Obliterate."

By one estimate, 80 percent of the companies that make up the Fortune 500 bought into one kind of re-engineering effort or another, with the philosophy's bastard child, downsizing, being most popular because it had such a strong effect on the bottom line in a short period.

Dumping bodies was very profitable.

To do it, the old implied contract between capital and labor had to be shattered, and shattered it was with great energy and passion. No one was embarrassed anymore to talk about taking the ax to employees who could not keep up or didn't fit the sparkling new agenda. It was as though having a job was some kind of special favor, not at all an honest exchange of work for money.

It all fell particularly hard on white-collar people in middle-management jobs, who were made to feel as though they had become useless scum, worthless in the construct of the corporation and cannon fodder in the quest to improve return on investment as quickly as possible.

There was a lot of tough talk attached to this graduate business school babble, with management consultants completely insulated from the implications of their philosophy, pointing out that stragglers and opponents simply had to be crushed.

Some corporations love this kind of thing, of course.

What more could anyone in the boardroom ask for: A formula for deep cost-cutting and the permission to suck it right out of the labor force. Wear a long face making the announcement, but smile inside because Wall Street, too, loves a good downsizing announcement. It makes you look tough. It makes your numbers go up.

In the past three years alone, the downsizing numbers have drifted well into the hundreds of thousands. Rafts of middle managers were abandoned, along with whole sections of companies where it was thought that technology could be used to replace staff.

In retrospect, it looks a lot like re-engineering was a dusted-off version of an old management consulting trick: Convince the client the world will end unless he buys your philosophy and product right now.

The more complicated the commitment the better, because it yields long-term fortunes for consulting companies and their partners. Of course management played its part, too, buying into the notion and slashing away with what it believed was surgical precision.